Big Walk Controls: How to Play, Use the Backpack and Belt, and Change Colour

By DayOneFix Editorial · August 24, 2026

Big Walk’s controls are simple; the ones people search for are the ones the game never spells out. The single most useful fact: you cannot touch your own backpack or belt. Another player has to put a bag on you, and another player has to take the item back off — and the same is true of the paintbrush that changes your colour. Almost everything awkward about Big Walk’s controls follows from that one design decision.

Here’s the practical version, with the official settings first and the undocumented mechanics after.

How to play Big Walk: the official basics

These come straight from House House’s FAQ:

Mouse and keyboard or a controller both work well. The computer version supports most gamepads, and the Nintendo Switch 2 version supports that console’s mouse mode. Steam lists full controller support including DualSense and DualShock.
You can rebind everything at Settings › Rebinding.
Push-to-talk is a setting, not a default. If nobody can hear you, check Settings › Audio › Mute Mode — if it’s on “hold”, you have to hold the key down. Some other controls also offer Hold or Toggle.
Any challenge can be skipped. The host enables challenge skipping from the accessibility menu when starting a session. House House built it for players who can’t hear, speak, react quickly or use fine motor controls, but it’s there for anyone genuinely stuck.
Motion sickness has two dials: Motion Reduction Overlays at Settings › General, and Field of View at Settings › Graphics on PC and Mac.
Players can pick up and carry each other. The FAQ lists this under accessibility, but it’s a core traversal tool — see below.

One control that doesn’t exist: talking to your friends outside the game. The FAQ’s answer on Discord is “NO WAY… ❌ NOT ALLOWED ❌”, and the reasoning is that puzzles deliberately restrict who can hear whom.

Everything from here down is community-documented. House House publishes no controls reference beyond the in-game tutorial area, so these come from player guides — which is exactly why the tutorial area is worth not skipping.

How to use the backpack in Big Walk

Backpacks and hip bags are found hanging inside blue circular structures that look like parking garages or wastepaper baskets, each with a short blue ramp leading in. They are not given to you; you have to find them.

The rules that catch everyone:

Another player equips it. They pick the bag up, look at you, and a white circle appears on your body showing where it can go. You cannot put a bag on yourself.
Another player has to take things off it, too. This is the part that frustrates two-player groups: a walkie-talkie on your own belt is unreachable by you. Steam forum posters have made this the recurring feature request since launch, and one player summed the situation up exactly: “there’s backpacks and belts in game that lets you carry stuff, with the only caveat is that someone else would have to take it off of your body.”
One item per bag. A backpack and a hip bag together mean you can carry three things: one on your back, one on your hip, one in your hands.
Round lanterns can’t go in a bag. They have to be carried by hand.

There’s also a specialist bag — a control panel piece carrier, found under the weather balloon north of the Green and Blue Towers — that holds two puzzle pieces at once and slots onto a backpack. If your group is shuttling pieces to a tower, it’s the single biggest time-saver in the game.

How many bags are there? The sources disagree, so treat any total with suspicion. Screen Hype’s location list names eleven bags (six backpacks, five hip bags) across nine blue structures, but the same article’s summary line says “there are only nine bags,” the author’s Steam version says “all ten backpacks and hip bags,” and their beginner-tips piece says nine. What all of them agree on is nine blue structures, each holding one bag except a far-southeast one that has both.

How to use the belt in Big Walk

The belt — the “hip bag” in most guides — works exactly like the backpack: found in the same blue structures, holds one item, must be put on and emptied by someone else. The Steam achievement for it, Big Help, is worded “Wear something on your hip,” and sits at 30.4% on Steam’s global stats as of 2026-08-24.

Guide authors report belts turn up mostly in the later part of the island while backpacks cluster early, so if you’ve only ever found backpacks, you’re probably not far enough along yet.

The practical loadout for a pair: both players wear a backpack and a hip bag, and each carries the other’s walkie-talkie. That way when you split up, each of you can still reach a radio — because you’re each carrying the one the other person will need to hand you before you separate.

How to change colour in Big Walk

Your avatar has three paintable sections — head, upper body, lower body — and starts with random colours you can’t see on yourself.

The customisation area is at coordinates 3570, 1190: leave the tutorial area through the huge floor-to-ceiling archway, head down the mountain path to a spot with a flare device and a bench, then look right across the river. It’s a structure with green, yellow and red walls under metal scaffolding, with a large paint palette on the green back wall.

To use it:

A friend picks up the paintbrush and paints you. You cannot paint yourself. They dab the brush in a colour and aim at your head, upper body or lower body — a white circle appears on each as they target it.
One colour per section, and only the colours on the palette.
There’s a mirror on the far right so you can see the result, and a light switch on the yellow wall worth flipping, because the area is very dark at night.
Your colours persist across sessions, and you can come back and redo them any time.

The shiny/metallic colours are a separate, late-game thing — the achievement Big Makeover (“Get shiny”), at just 5.7%, which makes it the second-rarest in the game. It needs a salon inside the tunnel system, so you need the Yellow Tower key first. Here the two best guides give different routes: Screen Hype says follow the Yellow Tunnel to the dance room, take the back left corridor, keep going until the grey walls turn red, take the red corridor right at the green junction, and you reach a giant red staircase down into the salon. tasselfoot describes it as near the Red/Blue connection by the Rave, over a green bridge and down Escher-ish red stairs into a purple area. Those may well be the same room approached from two sides — we can’t verify which description is more useful, so here are both. Either way, a friend applies one of the shiny colours from the bottom of the palette.

How to use arm signals (the control you’ll use most)

The tutorial area teaches these on a wall and most groups walk past it. On keyboard:

Input	Result
`Q`	Left arm up
`Q` + left click	Left arm out to the side
`E`	Right arm up
`E` + right click	Right arm out to the side
`Q` + `E`	Both arms up
`Q` + `E` + both clicks	Both arms out to the side

That’s six distinguishable poses, and they’re the entire vocabulary you get when a puzzle takes your voice away. Groups that agree on meanings in advance — arms up for yes, arms out for no, and so on — clear the charades-style puzzles dramatically faster. One Steam guide author went as far as building a full semaphore-derived signalling system for exactly this reason.

To stand on someone, look at each other until a white circle appears at their waist, then left-click. They pick you up and you stand on their head. Chained repeatedly, this is how groups climb walls they’re not meant to climb.

To turn a lantern on, pick it up and left-click — but aim it away from its stand first, or you’ll just put it back down.

Is there a “fly” button in Big Walk?

No. Big Walk has no flight mechanic, no jetpack and no fly command. What people mean when they say “how to fly” is one of two things, and neither is a game feature:

Prop climbing — an exploit. Two Steam guides document it: hold a prop, then repeatedly release it, jump off it, and grab it again, gaining a little height each cycle until you’re above the level geometry. Guide authors recommend the handheld map as the best prop for the standing version and a light ball for the moving version, and most of them use an autoclicker or turbo key binds because the rhythm is hard to hit manually.
A photo-mode mod — a third-party mod that detaches the camera and lets you fly it around for screenshots.

Both are worth knowing about and neither is something we’d recommend mid-campaign. Prop climbing puts you outside the intended play space, where the “made it harder to clip through certain walls that could cause a player to get stuck” fix in patch 1.4.9 is a hint about what happens next. Mods are unofficial, load through a third-party framework, and are nobody’s responsibility but yours if a patch breaks them.

If what you actually want is to get somewhere high: that’s the chairlift, and the peak it reaches is a real achievement (Big Climb, “Reach the highest point”).

FAQ

How do you use the backpack in Big Walk? Find one in a blue circular structure, then have another player pick it up and put it on you — you can’t equip your own. It holds one item, and another player has to take that item off again.

How do you use the belt in Big Walk? Identically to the backpack: someone else puts it on you, it holds one item, and someone else has to remove it. The achievement Big Help unlocks when you’re wearing something on your hip.

Why can’t I take things off my own backpack? It’s a deliberate design choice, not a bug. It’s also the game’s most-requested change on Steam’s forum, where two-player groups point out it makes carried walkie-talkies unusable when you split up.

How do you change your colour in Big Walk? Go to the customisation area at coordinates 3570, 1190, down the mountain path from the tutorial exit and across the river, and have a friend paint your head, upper body and lower body with the paintbrush. Shiny colours are a separate late-game salon inside the tunnels.

How do you fly in Big Walk? You can’t — there’s no flight mechanic. Players reach the sky box with a prop-climbing exploit, or use a third-party photo-mode mod for a free camera. Neither is a supported feature.

How do you play Big Walk? Mouse and keyboard or a controller, both fully supported and fully rebindable. The real skill is communication: proximity voice, in-game text with the same behaviour, arm signals on Q and E, and standing on each other to reach high places.

Sources

Everything in the official basics section — controller and mouse-and-keyboard support, Switch 2 mouse mode, Settings › Rebinding, Mute Mode’s hold option, host-enabled challenge skipping and who it was built for, Motion Reduction Overlays and FOV, players picking up and carrying each other, and the ban on outside voice chat — is the developers’ own wording in the official Big Walk FAQ, checked 2026-08-24. Full controller support and DualSense/DualShock support are listed on the Steam store page for app 1478500, checked the same day. The achievements Big Help — “Wear something on your hip” (30.4%), Big Makeover — “Get shiny” (5.7%) and Big Climb — “Reach the highest point” come from Steam’s public achievement stats, read 2026-08-24. The 1.4.9 note about making it harder to clip through walls is from House House’s patch notes on the Steam news hub.

The bag mechanics are community documentation, because the game documents none of it. The blue structures, one item per bag, the three-item loadout, lanterns being excluded, the requirement that another player equips and unloads your bags, and the bag locations and counts come from fireboundfox’s Steam guide All Backpack Locations and Lyssa Greywood’s fuller versions at Screen Hype and in her beginner tips, all checked 2026-08-24 — and those sources contradict each other on the total, which is why we’ve reported the disagreement instead of a number. The rule that only another player can remove an item is independently corroborated by players in the Steam discussion forum in threads titled “Fun Game - Needs an inventory system”, “Only two remaining issues, IMO.” and “Can we get a backpack and belt rack?”, read 2026-08-24; the quoted line is from Steam user Cement in the first of those. The control panel piece carrier under the weather balloon appears in both Screen Hype’s item list and tasselfoot’s 100% Achievement Guide.

The customisation area at 3570, 1190, the three paintable body sections, the friend-with-a-paintbrush rule, the mirror and light, and colours persisting between sessions come from Screen Hype’s appearance guide, checked 2026-08-24; the two differing routes to the shiny salon are from that guide and from tasselfoot’s achievement guide respectively, and we have not verified either on the ground. The Q and E arm-signal table, the pick-up-a-player mechanic and the lantern’s left-click are from Screen Hype’s beginner tips; the semaphore-style signalling system is Steam user JohnPurple’s guide Hand Signals for Long Range Communication With No Radios.

That flying is an exploit rather than a mechanic is our reading of the only two documents that exist on it: Steam guides How to fly / prop climb by Guliker, which describes the release-jump-grab cycle and recommends the map and light ball as props, and How to fly by Shy, which recommends an autoclicker. The photo-mode mod is BigWalkPhotoMode. House House has never mentioned flight in any form; if it ever ships one, this page is wrong and we’ll update it. Chinese-language sources add nothing here — Bilibili’s Big Walk coverage is dominated by playthroughs and connection troubleshooting, its most-viewed guide being 拓海Sama’s 【Big Walk大步走】拓海的新手入坑指南 (BV1TCgs6jEfQ, 54,666 plays), a spoiler-free buying-and-onboarding video rather than a controls reference, and we found no WeChat article on controls at all via 搜狗微信.